


The Book of Hadass

by kmo



Category: Yentl (1983)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: Hadass follows Yentl to a new life in America.





	The Book of Hadass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SoundandColor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoundandColor/gifts).



After Avigdor died, Hadass, still dressed in mourning, sat down at the spindled walnut desk where she had first learned to study Talmud. She penned a letter to the one who had been her husband’s dearest friend, the wife of his mind, if not of his body. The woman had also once been her husband in another life, to a seemingly much younger Hadass. Hadass had never written to her before, and pressed her pen down on the paper with great deliberation, inking out the unfamiliar name Yentl, though her hand found it hard not to write Anschel.

Once Hadass began to write, she could not stop; the words flowed out of her like tears though her eyes were dry. She told Yentl of Avigdor’s quick and untimely death from influenza, how his bright life had been snuffed out in a handful of days. She told of the loneliness she felt without Avigdor to talk to and the difficulties of raising a young boy without a father. She told of the caged feeling she felt, the longing to break free. Suitors were already swarming around the house like flies to honey, and her parents were not so subtly encouraging them, even with Avigdor barely cold in his grave. She did not wish to be pressured to marry again.

 _I would like to do as you have done_ , she wrote.  _To go someplace where people are different_.

Hadass deliberated how to close her letter. “Love” did not feel appropriate, though she had loved the man called Anschel once. “Sincerely” seemed cold and formal. She settled for “Yours.”

As a postscript she impulsively added a line from the Holy Book, painstakingly copied in strange, unfamiliar English:  _Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God_.

In a month’s time, Hadass received a letter. There were colorful brochures advertising sailings from Hamburg and Rotterdam to New York, but Yentl’s reply constituted a single word:  _Come_.

*

From the deck of the steamship  _McKinley_ , Hadass watched her son Malachi chase seagulls from port to starboard. Despite her choice of a May crossing, there was a chill in the air and the waters of the Atlantic were choppy and rough. Though she felt queasy, Malachi had taken to the sea like a small whale to the ocean, the happiest she had seen him since his father’s death.

She turned again to the English phrasebook nestled in her lap and began practicing the strange phrases with the diligence with which she had once studied Talmud, though now she had no teacher.  _How much is the red book? I would like two pints of milk, please_.  _Which way to the museum?_

She had been practicing nearly every free minute of the voyage, often drilling Malachi along with her so that they would not be totally helpless in a new country. She could probably chant the phrases in her sleep.  _The weather is very fine today_.  _I did not bring an umbrella._

The words swam on the page before her and Hadass shut her book, needing a break. Confident that Malachi was happy at play, she pulled a worn. yellowed letter out of her small handbag and read. She had read the letter many times before and found herself reading it anew, still searching for some insight to leap off the page and make itself clear to her. It was the first letter Anschel…now Yentl…ever sent to her—the only one until very recently. Hadass had never written back.

One phrase she returned to over and over.

_You were a good wife to me, Hadass, and more importantly, a good friend. I wish we could have become friends without such deception. I know you perhaps will not believe me, and will understand if you do not wish to write to me. I know that you loved me and I felt honored by your love. Please believe that in my own way I loved you, too._

At the time when she received the letter, she had been too confused and angry to respond. It was like a stranger had come and stolen her beloved husband Anschel away from her. She felt a fool to have been deceived. Avigdor had helped soothe away the pain and the hurt. She believed him when he told her that he had not known Yentl as a husband knows his wife.

Some scholars would say Yentl was a demon for dressing like a man. Yentl wasn’t a demon, Hadass knew. She had done what she had done out of a love for Avigdor. And her studies. Hadass thought that in the end Yentl must have loved study more, or she would have married Avigdor.

Avigdor had loved her in the way Yentl as Anschel could or would not. He had filled her life with all of the blessings she had been denied—and not just on the Sabbath. But there had been moments she found herself missing Anschel, moments in bed when Avigdor’s frame had seemed too big and too broad, and she dreamed of a lover with skin as soft as her own and someone who didn’t make her feel so small in his arms. And Avigdor never noticed when she got the cookies all the same size.

 _I wish I had found a way to make it work—the three of us. I wish we could have all stayed together_ , he had told her once, forlorn after receiving a letter from Yentl, longing to debate and spar with her with her in person instead of with paper and pen.

Hadass folded the letter back into her purse and grabbed Malachi’s hand to go in to dinner. As the steamship sped westward toward America, she felt Avigdor’s blessing blow at her back. Or perhaps it was just the ocean breeze.

*

They descended the gangplank in New York harbor, surrounded by a mass of people shouting, honking, kissing, and crying. Hadass, dressed in her smart brown travelling suit and new hat, gripped her son’s hand tightly as she searched the crowds for a familiar face. For a minute, the alarming thought came to her that perhaps she would not recognize Yentl after so many years and dressed as a woman no less.

But then she saw a gangly woman with Anschel’s same golden brown hair elbowing her way through the crowd. “Hadass! Hadass!” she called to her, waving.

All of the apprehension she had been feeling melted away at the sight of her in this new world of strangers. “An—Yentl?”

Yentl came to them. For a moment she looked like she wanted to embrace Hadass, which made Hadass blush in spite of herself. “It’s good to see you,” Yentl said. She turned and bent down to her son, giving him a firm American handshake, which he shyly returned. “And this must be Malachi who have I heard so much about.”

Her son looked up at her then buried himself in her skirts, acting more like a child of three than five. “He gets shy around strangers.”

Yentl nodded. “Well, we had better be moving out of the crowd. We’ll take the streetcar home.” She grabbed Hadass’ small valise and took her hand with the same surety that Hadass had taken Malachi’s. Before Hadass quite knew what was happening, Yentl was pulling them through the crush of bodies. Hadass hung on to Yentl’s hand for dear life, afraid of being lost in the crowd and its Babel of languages. Finally, they spilled out onto a corner and Yentl shepherded them toward a kind of miniature train.

Hadass’ mouth hung quite agape as Yentl spoke to the driver and paid their fare in confident English, exchanging strange coins for tickets as if she had done it all her life. Yentl in her starched white shirtwaist moved differently in America, Hadass thought. She was not exactly graceful or pretty, but she stepped with a certainty, as if she knew her place in this world. Anschel had not moved that way. He had always seemed shy, unsure, so unlike her father and Avigdor and other men she knew. It was different. Different in a good way.

*

Hadass had tried not to show her disappointment at the dirty streets clogged with persons from every end of the globe hawking every kind of merchandise imaginable. She had tried even harder not to let her face fall when. after climbing four flights of stairs, they finally reached Yentl’s narrow apartment. It was dim and filled with cooking smells from the rooms below, cabbage and potatoes. There were only three rooms—a tiny parlor, Yentl’s room, and another for Hadass and Malachi to share.

Yentl took one look at her and noticed her obvious disappointment. “You were expecting milk and honey? Streets paved with gold?”

“I don’t know,” Hadass said neutrally. She was a rich man’s daughter and had lived a pampered life back in the old country but she did not mean to let it show. Nor did she intend to give up.

“Sometimes two whole families will share a space like this, six to a room. But I like it here, it’s where our people live and close to the school where I teach,” Yentl said, offering the explanation Hadass had not asked for.

“Where you lodgest I will lodge,” Hadass said, a wry quirk to her mouth.

Yentl smiled back at her, defensiveness gone, all bright eyes and white teeth.

*

Hadass did her best to make their three pokey little rooms feel like a home, even if at times the bedchamber she shared with Malachi seemed narrower than the airing cupboard in her parents’ house. After her trunks were finally delivered, she washed the dirty windows and hung them with lace curtains that once adorned the bedroom she had shared with Avigdor. Hadass unpacked delicate porcelain dishes and placed them beside Yentl’s chipped ones in what passed for a cupboard. She and Malachi ventured out to the market stalls where she bargained in uncertain English. She was certain she had been overcharged, but making herself heard in a foreign tongue brought its own secret satisfaction.

When Yentl returned home from her day of teaching, she found the flat sparkling, filled with the smell of cinnamon and apples. Her jaw dropped open in a fishlike manner and quickly shut again, remembering her manners. “Hadass, you didn’t have to do all this work.”

Hadass pouted, wounded. “I wanted to—this is our home, you said. Don’t you like it?”

“I love it. I never dreamed it could look so clean. But, still, I should have been here to help you. I don’t want you to think of yourself as some kind of domestic drudge,” she said.

Hadass felt herself wilt when just moments ago she had bloomed with pride. “This is what I am good at. This is all I know how to do,” she said quietly.

“Not all,” Yentl said. “You read Talmud, too.”

“Do they let women study Talmud in America?”

Now it was Yentl’s turn to look wounded. “Study, yes. Teach, no. We have no women rabbis here, but there are some teachers who are sympathetic, and some progressive parents who want their daughters educated the same as boys.”

“Your school,” Hadass prompts.

“Yes. It’s not much, what they pay me, but it beats working in some tiny windowless sweatshop day and night like many of our people do.” She paused, then added, “We have a small women’s study group that meets on Sunday afternoons. You should come.”

Hadass blushed a little, embarrassed at the thought of debating Talmud with anyone other than Yentl or Avigdor. Proud, too, that Yentl thought she could belong. “Perhaps I will.” She handed Yentl a small rose-patterned plate. “Baked apple?”

Yentl took it and inhaled the smells greedily, steam rising to fog the lenses of her spectacles. Her lips parted in a gentle surprise. “The plates?”

“You always liked them. The ones with the coral roses. You said the color matched my lips.”

“You remember everything,” Yentl says, tone soft with wonder. As Yentl's lips part to blow on the hot dessert, Hadass thinks the color matches her lips, too. As Anschel, Yentl had noticed everything, but not that.

*

There were moments when Yentl seemed so alien that Hadass thought she hardly knew her at all. All of the qualities that had once seemed so feminine in Anschel now colored Yentl as masculine. Whereas Anschel had seemed shy, small, and feminine, Yentl appeared bold, brash, and mannish. Anschel’s mannerisms had been delicate and slight, but Yentl’s gestures were big and broad, her voice too loud and too coarse when she yelled at streetcar conductors or shouted hello at their neighbors in the street. It was all a puzzle to Hadass, a riddle she couldn’t solve.

But then Yentl would smile at her, a knowing smile, or tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear as Anschel had once done, and all her apprehension would vanish like mist.

Tonight, at the women’s study group, Yentl was in her element, among other women like herself—equally loud, brash, and bold, burning with knowledge. Hadass thought Yentl burned brightest of all as she debated with them in both their native tongue and an English too fast and fluent for Hadass to follow.

They were discussing the story of Esther. Most of the women, plain and bookish like Yentl, despaired at the way Esther was praised for her beauty, at the unreasonable model she set for women. The debate felt like a dance in which Hadass did not know the steps, so she watched quietly from the back of the room rather than jump in and embarrass herself.

As the conversation grew more and more heated, some of them stole looks in Hadass’ direction.

“Esther is praised as this heroine of the people, but she was nothing but the tool of a man, her kinsman. If she was not beautiful, she would never have married the king—she was a tool and nothing more,” a stocky woman wearing spectacles said.

“Well, aren’t most beautiful women that way? Beauty inhibits the development of brains—why attempt to improve your mind when you’ll get much farther turning yourself into a silent ornament?” a tall Russian woman said with a sneering glance at Hadass. Some of the other women giggled.

Yentl frowned and squinted beneath her spectacles. Hadass waited for her to come to her defense, but instead she turned and looked her squarely in the eye and asked, “Hadass, what do you think?”

Hadass felt a dozen pairs of eyes turn upon her and she grew hot under their gaze. She was suddenly painfully aware of the silk and lace blouse she was wearing, extravagant compared to the coarse thin shirtwaists of the others. Her lips trembled and part of her longed to run screaming from the room, fetch Malachi and take the next boat back home. But that was not why she came here, she remembered.

“I think,” Hadass began carefully, “I think that in the moment Esther revealed herself to the king, she was not a beauty. She was not even a woman. She was a Jew and she was putting herself in grave danger for the good of her people. Her beauty was no armor against the king’s absolute power. And I do not see why beauty and brains and bravery cannot coexist in the same person.”

The Russian muttered something that might have been an apology, then sat down, chastened. Yentl beamed at her from across the room and her look of pride made Hadass feel funny all over. The way Anschel had once made her feel.

*

As they sat in their tiny sitting room after the meeting, Malachi safely tucked in bed, Yentl said, “You were wonderful in there, tonight. You should speak up more often. Your ideas are important, Hadass.”

“I don’t know,” she found herself saying bashfully. “I don’t think your friends liked me.”

“Ack, don’t mind them. They’re bitter, Disappointed and hurt by the brothers and fathers and mothers and nagging yentas who say Talmud has unfit them for marriage, that they should focus on making babies instead of debating scripture. And so they take it out on other women, women they don’t understand.”

“Well, why can’t a woman have both? Talmud and babies,” Hadass inquired.

“Why not indeed?” Yentl smiled to herself, then glanced at Hadass, eyes glinting in the dark. “Once, you know, I would have been one of them. But you taught me to see things differently.”

A bloom rose to her cheeks at Yentl’s words of praise. Hadass turned away to hide it. “It’s very warm in here tonight, don’t you think? Too warm for tea.” She began to carry the cups and saucers to their small wooden sink.

Yentl followed her, undeterred by her attempt to change the subject. “I’ve missed you, Hadass. I’ve missed the way we used to talk. Those others…well, they are not Avigdor, but they aren’t you, either.”

Hadass turned. Yentl was so close, and it was so much like when they were married, when she had felt drawn to her like a magnet to a loadstone. She hadn’t had a name for those feelings before, that trembling electricity that shivered all over her skin. “I’ve missed you, too,” she said. And then she let go, desire pulling her toward Yentl like a current, propelling her lips forward to touch Yentl’s in a sweet, soft kiss.

Yentl did not pull away this time, and gradually her lips awoke, hesitantly moving, gliding over Hadass’ own. Her hands grasped Hadass’ forearms and pulled her tight and close. The firmness of her embrace was enough to make Hadass moan into Yentl’s mouth, cupping her smooth cheeks, kissing her over and over until Yentl reluctantly pulled away.

“We can’t, Hadass. Two women…we just can’t.” Yentl’s words said no, but the dusky look in her eye, the flush in her cheeks indicated she wanted this as much as Hadass did.

Hadass nuzzled her nose against Yentl’s, seeking out her lips again, insistent. “Is it written?”

“Well, yes—”

“I don’t care,” Hadass said before kissing Yentl again, hard. When Hadass’ tongue met hers, she felt Yentl sigh, felt her knees go weak and every bone and muscle melt into her embrace.

Shirtwaists and blouses were shed and pins plucked from thick coils of light and dark hair until at last they stood before Yentl’s bed in nothing but their corsets and underthings, excited and terrified.

Hadass placed a kiss right behind Yentl’s ear and whispered, “I believe you still owe me a wedding night.”

Yentl shook her head, eyes downcast. “Hadass…I want this, I want you…but I don’t know what to do. I’m still…a maiden.”

Hadass could see the mixture of desire and fear in her eyes. Yentl, normally so confident, now looked lost. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. And I am not an innocent maiden anymore.” She brought Yentl’s hand to her breast, encouraging her to explore, inviting her to pick at the laces of her corset, rewarding her with a throaty moan when she at last began to pinch and tease her nipples.

As they tumbled into bed, Yentl smiled and said, “Tonight it will be your turn to teach me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for giving me a chance to revisit an old favorite, definitely one of my "gay roots" although I didn't understand that at the time. 
> 
> The scripture Hadass quotes in her letter is from the Book of Ruth, the most sapphic of all Bible verses. ;)


End file.
